This century-old acacia tree outside the Marikina Footwear Museum was uprooted by a tornado in 2018. Instead of getting rid of it, the residents used bonsai techniques to revive and restore what remained. Today, new growths sprout from the trunk. For locals, the tree has come to symbolize resilience & survival. It's a reminder that whatever calamity we face, it's still possible to find new life.

After returning home from documenting the traumatic atrocities of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Salgado found his family's former cattle ranch in the Minas Gerais region of Brazil entirely degraded, dry, and deforested. To help restore both the damaged land and his own deep exhaustion, Lélia proposed replanting the forest.
In 1998, they founded an organization called Instituto Terra and, over the next two decades, planted more than 2 million native saplings. The massive ecological restoration effort successfully brought back a thriving tropical ecosystem, reviving local water springs and returning hundreds of species of birds, mammals, and insects to the area.